Homework

Chapter 4:  Domesticity


Author's Note: Over the last couple of chapters, Brian and Justin have been adjusting to being full time parents and settling in to the house. This is another chapter where nothing much happens, but there are going to be some dramas coming up soon and I want to lay a sort of foundation of the normality of their lives before that normality gets shaken by the storms. Bear with me. And enjoy the calm while it lasts.


*****
 

Justin

It’s my turn to pick Gus up from my Mom’s today, so I keep a close watch on the time; I’m not going to take any risks about being late. Besides I need to go to the loft and get some more clothes and stuff. It’s a little after two when I stop painting, and I think about going somewhere to get lunch, but then I figure Mom will feed me when I get to her place. I’ll be there early, but that just means we can hang out for a while. Maybe Molly will be home from school on time for once and I can see her. I head to the loft and pack up a duffle bag with some things for me and some socks and underwear for Brian - stuff that won’t crease; fuck knows I’d never dare cram any of his shirts or even ties into a duffle bag. I’m done and in the car, just pulling out of the parking garage, when I see Joan Kinney walking towards the main entrance.

For a moment I hesitate; then I pull over, get out the car and walk towards her. She looks up as I approach and for a moment she almost looks scared; although, if she is frightened, it mainly just makes her straighten her shoulders and try to look fierce. It’s a reaction that reminds me of Brian, and I have a kind of epiphany, a moment of pure insight as I realize where Brian learned his “never show weakness” take on life.

An image forms in my mind: a huge dark hulking figure, the embodiment of threat and danger, looming over a much smaller one – maybe a child, maybe a small woman. Despite the threat, it’s clear from its stance that the smaller figure isn’t going to give an inch; it kind of radiates both terror and defiance.

The background in my image is made up of dark clouds of blackened purples and greens - the colors of bruises, which are limned here and there in muddy russet - the color of dried blood, while the whole is slashed across with streaks of lurid yellow-green – the color of bile.

In that instant I know I’ve found the second painting I want to have ready for the Warhol in case they don’t like Love&Hate; and I know that I’ve been given a precious nugget of gut-deep understanding about Brian’s childhood.

It’s also given me some insight into Joan Kinney’s life, and I can see her, at least at this moment, not simply as a mother who failed to protect her son, but as a woman who shared the terrors and the horrors with him. With that insight at the forefront of my mind, I find myself smiling at her reassuringly.

She smiles back, and I can tell by the way her face lightens that she just hadn’t recognized me at first. I guess to her coming to fag-ville is like walking through a neighborhood ruled by gangs. She’s probably as shit scared of running into … well, someone like Emmett or, even worse, Kiki or Mysterious Marilyn, as she would be of meeting a knife-wielding crack-head.

“Hello, Mrs. Kinney,” I say.

She nods at me, and then says, although it sounds a little forced, “Hello, J ... Justin.”

I smile at her again and say, “If you’re looking for Brian, he’s at work.”

“Yes,” she says, “Yes, of course, he would be. I just thought … I brought some cookies … for Gus. I thought he might like them.”

“Thank you, I’m sure he will.”

I’m sure I will too, just like I’m sure Brian will bitch about even having them in the house while he sneaks them when he thinks I won’t notice, but I don’t have to say any of that.

She opens the large bag on her arm, and holds out a plastic container full of cookies. There are going to be plenty for all of us.

I take it and smile at her again.

“You don’t have to tell Gus who they’re from,” she says - in almost exactly the same tone Brian would use.

Except, of course, that Brian would say something like “He doesn’t have to fucking know they’re from me”.

But the sound is the same – like just knowing the source would somehow poison them for the recipient.

So, although honestly I don’t really want to get to know Brian’s fucking mother, I can’t just let her walk away like that, with that sound in my ears. And while I’m gearing myself up to say something, make some offer I’m probably going to regret, I remember that Joanie not only came to tell Brian about Lindsay’s little games, she actually seems to have defended him, to Lindsay at least. And although that’s probably too fucking little, too fucking late, still …

So I hear myself saying, “Would you like to have a cup of coffee with me, Mrs. Kinney? And then maybe I could drive you home.”

She hesitates, but it starts to rain right then, so she says, “Well, if you know somewhere nice …”

She makes it sound like that’s really improbable, and I can tell her imagination is working overtime on the horrors that she might run into in this neighborhood, but I know a place that my Mom likes that’s not too far from here, so I help her into the jeep and we go there. She looks around kind of nervously when we walk in and it feels like she’s braced in a kind of fight or flight mode. It makes me think of a cat in a strange place, ready to start hissing and spitting or take off up the curtains if anything startles it.

But she seems to realize that the place is civilized and that she won’t be besieged by rampant homosexuals on the hunt, and she relaxes a little and is happy to take a seat. It’s table service, so we order and I decide to get something to eat as well. In the end, she does too so as we sit there waiting for our coffee and toasted ham and tomato sandwiches I search my mind desperately for something neutral to talk to her about. I feel like I might have set up a trap for myself, and am braced for action if she starts lecturing me about my no-doubt-in-her-mind disgusting lifestyle.

She surprises me, though, because she asks me quite civilly if I have family living in Pittsburgh. I tell her that my Mom and sister are both here, and so is my father, but that he and Mom are divorced and I don’t see him much. I don’t feel any compulsion to tell her why. To be honest, even if he hadn’t turned out to be a homophobic prick, the way he’s treated my Mom since they split up would have made me consider him a total asshole anyway, and I wouldn’t really have wanted anything to do with him. That realization hits me totally out of blue and it’s really a major epiphany, but I can’t think about it right now. I have to concentrate on not letting this coffee date with Joan Kinney turn into a total fucking disaster. What the hell was I thinking?

 

*****
 

Brian

It’s actually a fucking productive day at work. No dramas. No phone calls from lawyers or courts or hospitals. Just the usual shit of making sure that everything is running smoothly.

The presentation in the morning goes like clockwork. The client is happy to sign off on the contracts on the spot and we put together a timeline for implementation and roll out which doesn’t rely on everyone in the fucking company working fourteen hour days to make it happen. In fact, aside from doing spot checks on the quality, I can pretty much leave it to the team from here on.

I wonder how that happened. I guess what I should be wondering is why the fuck it didn’t happen with Ryder and Vanguard. Because the reason that things at Kinnetik work the way they should is down to the simple fact that I employ people who can fucking do their jobs properly. Sure, sometimes things go wrong. That’s life. Most things don’t go exactly to plan. But there sure as shit shouldn’t be major dramas over every detail of every fucking project the way there used to be. I should never have had to spend most of my fucking time trying just to keep the wagon on the tracks.

And here at Kinnetik, I don’t.

Here, it takes something major to throw things off track; the little things are dealt with by the department heads; the slightly larger dramas by Ted and Cynthia. I only need to get involved if every wheel has fallen off and the wagon has crashed into a fucking ditch. Because people are smart enough to flag as soon as they notice the first tiny wobble, so little problems get dealt with early and effectively, instead of being hidden and allowed to build up until they’re bad enough to wreck the fucking train. And how the fuck did I get caught up in this totally lame-assed metaphor? Or is it a fucking simile? I can never remember the fucking difference.

Anyway, all of this means that I can afford to send the art department home early with thanks for their work on the two presentations they’ve prepared for this week – both of which they’ve nailed first try - and tell Cyn and Ted to plan on taking either Friday or Monday and having a long weekend – they can toss up for which they’d prefer as long as one of them is in each day - and I can still leave the office right on the dot of five.

He calls me just as I’m getting into the car, so I put the Bluetooth on speaker.

His first words nearly make me crash into the back of a fucking police van.

He had coffee and lunch with my mother.

What the fuck?

“Honestly, Brian,” he says. “It was okay. I mean, I guess she’s never going to be totally comfortable with … you know.”

“Her son giving it to you up the ass,” I tell him.

“Or taking it,” he says in that cocky fucking way of his. Little shit.

“But anyway,” he goes on before I can respond to that little fantasy … well, maybe not fantasy, but he shouldn’t get any grand fucking ideas either. He’s the bottom-boy in this relationship. Mostly.

“An-yway,” he says insistently, like he somehow knows I was thinking of other things, “she was okay. I gave her my Mom’s phone number.”

“Why the fuck?”

“Well, she was asking about my family. And I told her about Mom, and how she really likes you, and stuff and she seemed … I don’t know … like it hadn’t occurred to her that a “nice” WASP lady like my Mom (I showed her a photo) would be happy to spend time with her gay son’s partner. I didn’t tell her about Mom looking after Gus or anything, so don’t get all bent out of shape over that.”

“So you’re going to subject your mother to endless fucking lectures from Ste. Joan the eternally pissed off?” I ask.

He laughs. “Brian … you know my Mom. Can you imagine she’d put up with that shit?”

I suddenly get a flash of Jenn’s reaction if anyone – my dear old Mom included – should dare to tell her that her darling son is going to burn in Hell. Suddenly, I would really like to be a fly on that wall.

“Besides,” he says, “If anyone can make her pull her head out of her ass, it’s my Mom.”

I shrug. Whatever the fuck. I suppose if Jenn is dealing with Joanie at least we don’t have to.

“Where are you?” I ask.

“Before you start asking what I’m wearing, you might want to say hello to your son.”

So he hands the phone to Gus, and I get a garbled run down of what’s been going on in his life today. It’s a complicated tale involving, it seems, purple crayons, dragons, the soup Grandma Jenn made him and a kid named Holmes Mitchell Raymond the third - “but he hates it and he says we should all call him Mitch and when the teacher calls him Holmes he gets all red and looks like he’s going to cry or something”. I don’t fucking blame him.

By the time Gus is winding down, I’m pulling into the driveway; as the car comes to a halt the front door opens and he comes running out. He helps me put the car in the garage and then we go inside. Justin is dishing up something out of a casserole – guess Mother Taylor sent something home - so Gus gets sent to wash his hands while I go upstairs to change. I’m feeling weird – like this is some alternate fucking universe and I should be freaking out over all this domesticity. But when I open the closet to hang my suit, there’s a velvet bag hanging on the back of the door with a note that says, “Gus isn’t the only one who gets to play with toys.”

I open it, and find a new dildo – one of those they call an “anal stimulator” since it’s curved specifically to stimulate the prostate and it’s also got a second “finger” which, once the damned thing is in, curves round on the outside to vibrate against the perineum. It’s a deep vibrant blue and I can picture it against the creamy whiteness of Justin’s skin; I imagine the skin flushing with arousal and wonder if he could be persuaded to kneel between my feet as he sucks me off so I can see it sticking out of his ass while I watch him.

I find myself grinning as I pull on my favorite jeans, soft and worn in all the right places.

Maybe domesticity isn’t as bad as it’s cracked up to be.

 

*****
 

Justin

After I dropped Mrs. Kinney at her house, I made another stop on Liberty Avenue before I went to my Mom’s to get Gus.

Maybe it’s stupid, but I felt like I needed to remind myself who I really am. I mean, I’m happy to be Brian’s partner and Gus’s Dus. But I’m still me … Justin Taylor.

The guy who loves cock. Who loves the taste and the smell and the feel of it – in my mouth, in my hand, up my ass.

I saw this thing and it’s different from anything we’ve used before. I pictured it up my ass, buzzing against my prostate and my balls at the same time and thought about how that will feel while I’m sucking him off and I had to have it.

Then I had to go to the diner and use the bathroom to jerk off before I could go to my Mom’s.

Debbie was working, over the moon because Mikey has managed to get an agreed custody arrangement with Mel and also because he got a call from Ben’s lawyer to say that Ben is going to be released next week.

So that’s all news I can share with Brian; or maybe he already knows, maybe Michael called him. But we have to wait until Gus is in bed; it’s not the sort of stuff he needs to hear.

So instead, over dinner, we actually make plans for the weekend. Saturday, Brian wants to spend some time working out exactly what we still need for the house. Maybe doing some online shopping. So we decide to have some groceries delivered so that we don’t have to go out, and just spend a fairly quiet day at home. Mom has volunteered to have Gus stay at her place on Saturday night, so we can have some big boy time. She’ll bring him home sometime on Sunday morning. So we decide that, as they’re predicting fine weather, Brian and I will go for a lesson in driving the boat from the guy who took us out last week. Then we’ll come back here, pick up Gus from Mom and all spend some time on the river.

Brian’s already organized the boat registration, and we can do our safety certificate online during the week. We don’t need a boating license in this state, but both of us would feel better if we knew more about what we’re doing out there – especially what to do if things go wrong.

Gus is really thrilled at the thought of going out in the boat again. So am I, come to that.

And so is Brian, although of course he’d die rather than admit it.

We get Gus into his bath and then watch a little of the Wiggles DVD with him before taking him up to bed.

I know Brian is constantly kind of knocked sideways about how happy Gus seems to be over being here with us. He’s hardly asked about Lindsay at all, and he seemed to accept Brian’s explanation that she’d gone away for a little while, but that she’d be back soon. He did ask if she’d gone back to Toronto, but once we assured him she hadn’t he seemed quite happy to just let it go.

Brian seems to be kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop, but I’m not. I don’t mean that I think everything is always going to be plain sailing with Gus. Of course it’s not. But I figure that those two women put the poor kid through so much shit, with all their bullshit split ups and getting back together and then dragging him off to Toronto and splitting up again, that I bet Gus is just glad to be somewhere that people aren’t screaming at each other all the time. Because I know Linds and Mel, and Mel in particular isn’t one to suffer in anything like silence. And although I guess Linds isn’t one for screaming and carrying on like a demented banshee the way Mel does when she’s upset, she has that WASP ice-lady thing going on, and I bet between them they made the atmosphere in every single place they lived totally hellish for a little kid. Because kids always pick up on that stuff.

Particularly when they’re being used as a weapon in the fights.

So it doesn’t surprise me at all that Gus is happy as a clam in chowder to be here with us. Why not? He’s got his Dad (and he adores Brian), he’s got his Dus, he’s being treated with consideration and respect by both of us, he’s got his own little room (which he loves) and he’s even got his very own Grandma to spoil him.

More importantly, he’s got stability and calm and love – lots and lots of love; and not just for him, but between Brian and I. I think he feels that, and I think it’s one of the main things that makes him happy to be here. Because I don’t think he felt that with Linds and Mel. I don’t think he’s felt that between them for a very very long time; so long, maybe he doesn’t even remember it.

 

*****
 

Brian

I’m seriously thinking about sound-proofing the fucking bedroom. He yells so damned loud when he comes with that thing in his ass and my mouth on his cock that I can’t believe Gus sleeps right through it.

We kind of freeze for a few minutes, then I move to get the thing out of his ass and he waves me away.

“I can do it. You check on Gus.”

But when I peer into his room, expecting to find the poor kid sitting up in bed totally traumatized, he’s still sleeping like … well, like his Dus does in the morning when just about nothing wakes him except the smell of coffee or my dick up his ass.

I stand watching him for a few minutes. Just like I used to watch Justin. Fucking lesbian that I am. I have the same feelings … well, with a couple of obvious exceptions. But mainly I feel a kind of … I don’t know … wonder, I guess. Awe. Something like that. And something like … happiness. Maybe even gratitude. That I get to share these moments with these two amazing people.

These two people who amazingly like sharing their lives with me.

I still find it hard to process that. But I guess stranger things have happened.

Like me wanting to share my life with anyone; except within certain strictly defined limits.

But with Gus, there are no limits; there can’t be.

And with Justin … that little fucker just doesn’t acknowledge any limits on any fucking thing he wants to do.

Maybe that’s what I should really be grateful for.

He comes up beside me now and peers past my shoulder at my … our … sleeping son.

“Fuck! I can’t believe he slept through that,” he yawns.

“Takes after his Dus.”

I get a poke in the ribs for that, and then he winds his arm around my hips and we go back to bed.

I tell him I’ll go shopping for a ball gag before we use that thing again and he mumbles some bullshit about making sure I like the taste before he’s out, sound asleep, just like the kid across the hallway.

This used to be the time of night when I’d lie awake, but tonight I find myself drifting off after just a few minutes.

Fucking contentment … takes away a man’s right to insomnia … turns him into someone who actually gets a fucking “good night’s sleep”.

Man’s getting fucking old.

But not too old to make little Sunshine come screaming.
 

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